Why would using non-ASCII characters (I assume that is what you mean by Unicode characters) in a git commit message break anything sensible? It's meant to be hu

Why would using non-ASCII characters (I assume that is what you mean by Unicode characters) in a git commit message break anything sensible? It's meant to be human readable text, and defaults to UTF-8 (although you can use legacy encodings if you really must). Any git hook processing stuff would just look for stuff it does understand (like '([Cc]lose(s)?|[Ff]ix(es)?) #[0-9]+' or something similar) and ignore the rest. Scores of developers use non-ASCII characters as part of their native language every day in git commit messages, and even non-BMP Unicode characters like emoji work just fine.